1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and system for including information in a message between an originating communication terminal and a destination. The present invention relates more particularly to a method and system for including information in a SMS (Short Message Service) or MMS (Multimedia Message Service) message.
2. Description of Related Art
There is no easy automated way of sending context information of a mobile phone user such as the user's location or the temperature at the user's location, to one or several further mobile phone users by means of SMS. If a user wishes to share such information with others he has to insert this information manually in the SMS message. An example of a situation wherein it would be desirable to send such a message, is the case that a user is late for a meeting/date and would like to send a message to his friend indicating his position. In this way, the friend can estimate how much time the user will need to get to the meeting point. An example of such a message is “I am at Strand with Bedford” or “I am around 700 meters from you”.
In current mobile phones, the information contained in the header of the short message (mainly sender number, receiver number and sending and receiving times) is displayed separately from the message body that comprises the actual message. Including the user's context information in the short message header would have two main drawbacks. The first drawback is that due to the limited available space in the message header too little additional information can be attached in this way. The second drawback is that this information is not displayed together with the body of the SMS text message at the receiving terminal, so it cannot be seen at first glance by the receiving user.
Furthermore, as already indicated, in case that the user wishes to include the context information (e.g. location, temperature) in the body of the message, this context information must be obtained in a separate process, different from the writing of the message. For example, in case of sending his position, the user has to obtain his position for example by finding street plates, using GPS or Google Maps and then write it manually as text within the body of the short message.
EP 1 091 607 A2 discloses a method and apparatus for providing hypermedia content maintained remotely on a network to a wireless device without a browser. A Short Message Service request for Internet-based content is received from a wireless device on a wireless network at a proxy server via an SMS Centre (SMS-C). The proxy server transcodes the SMS request from a character set of the SMS-C to a character set of an application and extracts a keyword from the transcoded request. The proxy server looks up the extracted keyword in a keyword-to-URL mapping to identify the URL of an application associated with the keyword and constructs an HTTP POST operation containing the keyword and the URL which is submitted to the application over a wireline network such as the Internet. The proxy server extracts the requested content from a received HTTP response from the application in response to the POST operation, and then translates the content from the content-type used by the application to the content-type used by the SMS-C and transcodes the content from the character set used by the application to the character set used by the SMS-C. The translated and transcoded content is then sent as an SMS response to the SMS-C, for subsequent delivery to wireless device as an SMS message. So, according to this disclosure the originating communication terminal receives an answer with the requested information from the SMS-C.